Jan 11, 2019

Happy Friday

If you appreciate who you are, you will never be unhappy.

If you appreciate who you are, you will always have a Happy Friday!

Body Mass Index (BMI) Origin

Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (pronounced Ket-eh-lay) was born into a middle-class family on February 22, 1796. He was a mathematician, astronomer, statistician, poet, dramatist, and one of the founders of sociology. Quetelet believed society could be analyzed without bias using statistics. He described this new academic field as social physics, believing it would reveal important patterns in human society. In 1832, Quetelet discovered in his mountains of data a relationship between height and weight in adults. “The weights of individuals of different height are nearly like the square of their height.” In 1972, the American physiologist Ancel Keys formed the view that the Quetelet Index was the best way to identify obese individuals and gave it a new name – the body mass index.

In 1985, the U.S. National Institutes of Health adopted the body mass index or BMI as a means of identifying underweight and overweight individuals. He died age 77 on February 17, 1874.

Hardee's Frisco Burger

Hardee’s Frisco Burger, one of the first fast-food burgers served with bacon, came out during 1992 and was a hit. It revived bacon as an ingredient, and convinced other fast-food companies to bacon-ize their burgers. Bloomberg called it "a momentous event for fast food, and bacon’s fate, in America."


Incidentally, Hardees was founded by Wilber Hardee and is now owned by CKE, owner of Carl's Jr. Because of the similarity to the name of popular Canadian chain Harvey’s, all Canadian locations of Hardee’s need to be called Carl’s Jr.

Tool Tips

Synthetic wine corks are great for sealing partially used tubes of caulk. Drill a 5/16-in. hole into the cork about 1 in. deep. It makes an airtight seal and is reusable.

Used six pack holders are great for storing things, such as caulk, spray paint cans, WD40 cans, etc.
To keep pictures level, use two hangers or use small rubber feet with adhesive back on each bottom corner.
Spring is coming, so save old newspapers to spread on the ground before you mulch. It is very effective to eliminate weeds and easily poked through for planting. It also will keep moisture in and decompose over time.
Dryer sheets can be reused twice, so save them for that second load of clothes.
Egg cartons are great for keeping the odd screws, bolts, and nails separated and handy. They are also great indoor plant starters to get ahead of spring.

A soap dispenser brush is not just for the kitchen. Keep one in the shower with dish soap that also works well for a quick tile cleanup.

New Toothbrush

The Consumer Electronics Show is being held in Las Vegas this week and one interesting item is the 'Y Brush'. The info says to put toothpaste on it and hold in your mouth, press power button, and chew for five seconds, rinse then put more toothpaste on it, turn over and repeat for a full mouth brushing in ten seconds. There are four sizes for children and adults.

The ad says, "Our mouth is made up of 32 teeth with 3 visible angles for a total of 96 overall faces to be cleaned. If the recommended brushing time is 2 minutes minimum, then it means that each surface of the tooth should be brushed for 1.25 seconds at least for a total of 3.75 seconds per tooth.

With Y-Brush each of your teeth are brushed 5 seconds since all the teeth are brushed simultaneously, that is 4 times more than with a traditional manual or electric toothbrush during a brushing of 2 minutes." Price is $125 and no description about how long it will last. Will be anxious to read reviews on this one, which is due out in April, 2019. (PS - the arrow does nothing, I clipped the picture.)

Wordology, Shoes

From the annals of improbable research, we discover that 'Shoes' is a word which has many synonyms as this kind of outfit has developed in terms of its shape, which is obviously seen.


From the observation done in this research, there are 26 kinds of shoes with 36 distinctive features. The types of shoes found are boots, brogues, cleats, clogs, espadrilles, flip-flops, galoshes, heels, kamiks, loafers, Mary Janes, moccasins, mules, oxfords, pumps, rollerblades, sandals, skates, slides, sling-backs, slippers, sneakers, swim fins, valenki, waders and wedge. The distinctive features of the word “shoes” are based on the heels, heel shape, gender, the types of the toes, the occasions to wear the footwear, the place to wear the footwear, the material, the accessories of the footwear, the model of the back of the shoes and the cut of the shoes. Hmmm, this is no barefoot observation.

Free up Phone Space

If your phone response is getting sluggish or you get the message that it is getting full, there are two places to look, pictures and messages. Obviously movie files and podcasts take up the most storage. You can back up files to the cloud or your PC, then delete the largest files first to gain the most storage with the least amount of files deleted.
You should routinely delete old photos and videos anyway as good maintenance. As a side benefit, you will be able to find what you want faster. Also, if you lose your phone there is less chance of pictures hitting the internet.

To many it is not as obvious, but messages, especially messages with pictures or videos take up an enormous about of room. You can save the pictures and videos from messages into your pictures app, then delete them from messages. Many people do that, but do not realize there are duplicates taking up an enormous amount of space. Even without pictures, messages take up much space. The easy to delete messages is to check delete all, then uncheck the boxes of ones you wish to keep. Just as with photos, routinely deleting old messages is good maintenance to keep your phone from getting sluggish and from running out of space.

Robocalls

Robocall management company YouMail has been tracking the volume of calls and says that 2018 saw 48 million of them harass cell phone owners in the US last year, up 60 percent from 2017. It is easy for robocallers to spoof a local number and trick you into answering by making you think you are getting a legitimate call from your area instead of from a toll-free number you do not recognize. About 60 percent of robocalls are classified as legitimate, even if they seem annoying to you. Those would be things like automated messages from pharmacies, schools and political candidates. I think we need to renegotiate what constitutes 'legitimate robocall'.

Google Search Tip

When our memory decides to prevent us from recalling that one key word, phrase, or number we need in order to find what we are looking for, you can turn to the powerful asterisk "*" symbol. Just use this in the place of the word/phrase you can’t remember, and you should be able to find the results you are looking for. For example, junk* returns anything that has junk as a prefix, including junk itself. Junk * returns any phrase containing "junk".

Sometimes we urgently need to acquaint ourselves with events that occurred during a certain period of time. To do so, you can add a time frame to your search query with the help of three dots between the dates. For example, if we want to find out about scientific discoveries during the 20th century, we can write: scientific discoveries 1900...1999.

Jan 4, 2019

Happy Friday

"Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, 'It will be happier.'" ~Tennyson

We awake to a happier day, especially on a Happy Friday!

Happy National Trivia Day

January 4 each year is National Trivia Day. Over time, the word “trivia” has come to refer to obscure and arcane bits of dry knowledge as well as nostalgic remembrances of pop culture. You can celebrate by getting together with friends and play Trivial Pursuit. You can call friends and family and enlighten them with some trivia. More fun is to stop random people and start a conversation with “did you know...?” You may even make some new friends. You can also pick up one of my books and spend the day filling your brain with more random trivia.

Quick Trivia

Three Musketeers used to contain three small bars of vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate.
Chemists describe the old book smell as grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.
The Sun-Maid Raisins girl was modeled after Lorraine Collett Petersen.
A California woman once tried to sue the makers of Cap'n Crunch because crunch berries contained no berries.
During 2006, a man tried to sell New Zealand on eBay. The price went to $3,000 before eBay shut it down.
Forty is the only number in which the letters are in alphabetical order.


Despite the urban legend, birds ingesting uncooked rice will not explode.

Nutritious Foods

After analyzing more than 1,000 raw foods, researchers ranked the ingredients that provide the best balance of your daily nutritional requirements.
There is no one food that contains all the nutrients necessary to meet, but not exceed, our daily nutrient demands. Scientists assigned each a nutritional score. The higher the score, the more likely each food would meet, but not exceed daily nutritional needs, when eaten in combination with others.
Out of the top one hundred from the one thousand analyzed, pork fat came in eighth (one is most nutritious). It provides a good source of B vitamins and minerals. Pork fat is more unsaturated and healthier than lamb or beef fat. It has 632kcal per 100g and has a nutritional score of 73. Of all the most nutritious foods, pork fat is the only one derived from livestock.

So, my opinion that bacon is the best tasting (my friend Mike says it is Maple Bacon) and most satisfying, is fortified by scientists who rate is as eighth most nutritious. According to them it is more nutritious than sweet potato (nutritional score 49), ginger 49, Brussels sprouts 50, broccoli 50, cauliflower 50, carrots 51, oranges 51, tomatoes 56, spinach 59, kale 62, etc.

Almonds came in first as most nutritious, and is rich in mono-unsaturated fatty acids, promotes cardiovascular health and may help with diabetes. It has 579kcal per 100g and has a nutritional score of 97.


Food selection, ranking based on the scientific study “Uncovering the Nutritional Landscape of Food”, published in the journal PLoS ONE. The list can be found at LINK

Silent Monks Singing Hallelujah

One last musical for the season. The silent monks provide three minutes of fun. It has been around for a while and has had 1.7 million views. LINK